He called her two months later. He was back in London.
(‘Dangerous,’ Angelica said.
‘It’s OK. We both know that nothing can happen.’)
Liar, liar, pants on fire. Well, they might as well have been, the speed with which the two of them undressed. Quickly, quickly, no time for regrets. Illicit lovers live in mean time; time is their enemy. Come on down, every second counts. Don’t answer the phone. Stay a little while longer; you’ve been gone for so long.
She could not possibly sleep. How could she when he was lying there beside her? He was a miracle. If a miracle occurred, did you turn over and go to sleep? She could not have enough of him. Proudly she listened to him inhale and exhale; look at him, he breathes. Every moment they were together was to be savoured. Precious, precious seconds. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…
But she did sleep eventually and when she woke it was seven o’clock and he was up and dressed already. He perched on the bed looking at her with a mixture of helplessness and determination, as if he had no choice but to cross the field of fire. ‘Last night changed things.’
‘Call me a silly deluded thing,’ Grace said, ‘but I already thought spending the night making passionate love and mumbling over and over that you love each other kind of did.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘And you’re just the same sweet soppy creature that I remember. I know I state the obvious but someone has to. So what do we do now?’
She smiled dopily, too happy, too close to the night before to worry.
‘I really think I love you, Grace,’ he said. But he did not look happy about it.
She pulled him gently down towards her. ‘I really think I love you.’
‘That makes it pretty serious.’
She nodded.
‘I didn’t ask you to.’
‘No, you don’t understand. This is not some cheating-husband bullshit. I really can’t. She’s not well. She… she’s got a problem.’
I could have told you that fifteen years ago, Grace thought, but she didn’t say it.
‘She never really took to New York, to our life there. And why should she? We don’t have that much in common.’ He looked away as he said, ‘She got pregnant that summer. The summer you were over.’
Well, snap!
‘I had been dating her for two years. Then she told me it was over and she went away. I was pretty cut up for a while although if I was honest with myself I knew we weren’t that good together. I had some fixation on her.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Boys are like that. I met you and you were everything she was not. I really liked you, but you scared me too. I know I talked a brave talk back then but I was a seriously square kid. You were so different from my mother, Cherry, most of the women I knew. That’s what was so good, and that was what drove me back to her, to what was familiar, unthreatening. Once I was back with her I knew pretty soon that I’d made a mistake but by then it was too late. By the way, she thinks I’m a pretentious little prick, and she’s probably right. But she really doesn’t have a lot of interests. She’s not a stupid woman. But she has her views and beliefs and she’s not prepared to move outside, not ever. And I’ve been busy working, being the husband I thought she wanted rather than the one she actually needed. I didn’t pay enough attention to her, to what she really wanted.’ The look on Grace’s face made him laugh. ‘Don’t look so surprised. We guys can work these things out as well as the next woman when pointed in the right direction; in our case two years of couple therapy and a spell in a drying-out clinic for her. A while ago she got drunk at lunchtime and wrapped the car round a lamp-post on her way to fetch the girls from school. I can’t stop thinking, what if they had been in that car with her? She spent six weeks in hospital. They sent her away with stronger painkillers and more sleeping tablets. We’ve got a housekeeper now. Cherry’s been back to the clinic but she’s drinking again. It’s a miserable sordid story and I’m greatly to blame. I’ve thought of leaving but, apart from feeling partly responsible for her problems, there are the girls to consider. If their mother was OK and we shared custody, I reckon they’d get over it, cope like most kids do. But she is not all right. I’m scared that if I did go, she’d lose it altogether and what would that do to the girls? I couldn’t leave them with her, so I’d take them and they’d probably end up having visits with their mom in an institution – not a good scenario.’
As she listened, Grace had tried to picture life in the Upper West Side apartment. All she saw were gothic images of a puffy prematurely aged Cherry reeling round the perfectly decorated rooms with a vodka bottle in her hand, her bubblegum-pink lipstick smeared across her lips and chin. Did she feel sorry for her? Not yet she didn’t. She could not forget the way Cherry had sailed back into Jefferson’s life, reclaiming him as carelessly as she had discarded him a couple of months before and with even less regard for the girl who had picked up the pieces while she was away. To this day she wondered if Cherry would ever have bothered if it hadn’t been for her seeing someone else making such a good thing from what she had thrown out. Jefferson was gazing at her as if she held the answer to the unanswerable. She took his hand and kissed it then held it to her cheek, looking up at him. ‘You said it yourself. You have no option but to stay.’
He was examining her cameras, turning them over in his hands, holding each one up to his eyes, peering through the lens. ‘Actually,’ he said, handing them back to her, ‘I’m a hopeless photographer.’
‘That’s all right; I’m sure I’m a pretty useless lawyer.’ She grinned at him. ‘Then again, as the man said when asked if he played the violin, “I don’t know, I haven’t tried.”’ She placed the Hasselblad in its box and held on to the Leica.
‘The way you touch those guys, the way you look at them, it’s like you’re in love.’
She did not reply. Instead she said, ‘The Leica is good for sneaking up on people. No mirrors shunting up and down. And at the moment of exposure you see the entire motif. The Hasselblad is for The Moment. The Leica is for the moment.’ She signed the different emphases in the air with her finger.
He liked her fashion shoots against the backdrop of a polluted urban wasteland, pictures she had done years before. ‘The message is excruciatingly obvious; I was a lot younger. But they’re good shots.’
‘You don’t want to be too subtle,’ he said. ‘People don’t get it if you are.’ He told her that he still wished he could take those complacent citizens from their lit-up, centrally heated, air-conditioned homes with their three-car garages and show them the desert they were helping to create. ‘Myself, I’m just the most eco-friendly guy you could hope to meet. I turn the tap off while I brush my teeth. I bicycle. I recycle. I eat organic so I expect I shit organic too. I drink coffee from humanely picked coffee beans. I spend a set amount of hours each week giving free advice to environmental organisations. Do I make a difference? Like hell I do. Do I carry on in spite of that? Sure I do.’
‘Of course. It’s the fun of being human; you just carry right on although you know damn well it makes no difference.’ She was still preoccupied with distance. She showed him some more fashion shots taken in the Seychelles. It had been early morning on Bird Island, a place easily confused with paradise.
‘For man there are no predators. The sea is a liquid-blue embrace, the wind wraps around you like a soft shield against the heat. The sky is alive with birds: humble-looking sooty terns, the rare tropic bird with its quill tail, and the white fairy tern, a perfect beauty across a night sky. Those white birds lay their eggs in the branches of the trees. The baby birds hatch precariously, and they stay there on that same branch waiting for their parents to feed them. From far away it looks as if the branches are covered in white candy floss. Up a bit closer, you think it must be singing fruit. Get closer still and you see it’s baby birds, from tiny to almost fully grown. The adult birds can only feed their young on the wing. It’s when you’re at touching distance and happen to shift your gaze downwards that you realise that, for every ten fluffy baby birds decorating the tree, there is at least one who has slipped and fallen to the lowest branches or even to the ground beneath. Once that low down they can’t be fed. But they don’t know, so they just sit there, stock still, patiently waiting for the food that never comes. The ones on the ground seem to be of a darker colour. Get right down, look closely, and you see that that darkness is the ants eating them alive. “Just look at that,” one of the models said, standing on the terrace of the restaurant, pointing at the trees. “Isn’t that just the cutest sight?” Well it was, from where she was standing. So it beats me how people always talk about having to see the wood for the trees; that way how can you learn to treasure each and every single plant for its unique contribution to the wood? If you see only the wood, you’ll never miss a tree when it is felled. It’s more comfortable at a distance, of course it is. In fact it’s a godlike state.’
‘Perhaps distance is His problem – God’s, I mean,’ Jefferson said. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer to the age-old question of how He can allow such misery on earth. He means well, the very best, but from where He stands it all looks pretty good: there’s air to breathe (apparently it looks prettier from up there, the more polluted it is), we have the oceans and the lakes, the mountains and the streams, woods, plains… “Take a look at that,” He says to a visitor, pointing at the far-away earth. He is proud. Why shouldn’t He be? “You remember when I did the work?” He says to his friend. “I was flat out and so exhausted I had to rest all Sunday. But I knew I had done a great job. It’s a beautiful place; oh, is it beautiful. There’s everything anyone can need: air, water, food. The way I ordered nature, I’m telling you… genius. And look at them, I call them my children, see them milling about? How they have grown and multiplied. Actually, in that respect they have outdone all my expectations. I’m telling you, things must be going pretty well down there.”’ Jefferson stopped and shrugged, palms up to the heavens. ‘Could be as simple as that.’
‘So will you still love me from a distance?’ she asked, although she was sure his answer would be a resounding yes.
Instead he shook his head and sighed. ‘I honestly don’t know. Earth might look better from afar; but me, I’m a close-up kind of guy. I might not have the soul to love from a distance.’ He took her in his arms, kissing her hair and the lids of her closed eyes, her cheeks and her lips. ‘Let’s not worry about that. It’s here and now that matters. But whatever happens this will never be just another affair.’
Disappointed as she was with his answer, she could not help smiling. He was an intelligent man, a successful lawyer, yet he spoke his soap-opera lines with all sincerity and she loved him all the more for it, although she could not resist teasing. ‘This is bigger than both of us,’ she mumbled.
He replied, unsuspecting as ever, ‘I know, darling, I know it is,’ and there was a catch in his voice that made her feel instantly ashamed of making fun.
She shot a whole roll of black and white film just of him. At first, when she pointed the lens at him, he looked awkward, the way most people do, but soon he loosened up and enjoyed himself. ‘I always knew how to photograph you,’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m so good.’
‘Oh yes, oh yes, my darling, you are.’ Their eyes met and they burst out laughing. ‘But really,’ he said, ‘you have turned from gawky Grace to graceful Grace. When you work, you move with such delicate precision and you always know exactly where you are going.’ She blushed, pleased. It was her quiet embarrassment; being big and strong and often clumsy and answering to the name of Grace.
They sat together on the sofa, talking, as lovers do, of everything, as long as it was to do with them. ‘I was such a fool back then,’ he said.
‘And now?’
‘And now I’m older and a wiser fool.’
‘See, apart from you having become a bloodsucking leech of a lawyer instead of a man who treats wild animals for free, you haven’t changed that much. You’re a romantic who cheats on your women. You’re a loyal friend. You’re vain about your good looks but you still won’t pay for a decent hair-cut. You’re capricious and you’re thoughtful. You’re always in a hurry unless you’re making love. You have the ego of a small-size town but you love the success of others and dislike talking about yourself, and, my darling, you still mouth clichés with the innocent wonder of someone who’s just woken up to this world.’ At that he laughed, his dark head thrown back, his throat exposed where it was soft and white. She slid her finger across, just below the Adam’s apple. ‘Cut or kiss,’ she said.
He had a week. They made the most of the time between his meetings and her jobs by the simple trick of not sleeping more than an hour or two each night. Lying next to him in the early hours of the morning and able to touch him, just like that, as easily as if she was still dreaming, was a great and wholly unexpected happiness.
The morning he was due to return to the States she wanted him to go as soon as possible. She perched on top of the dirty linen basket watching him shave. He was naked. He had been curiously shy at the start of the week, covering up as if she might find his nakedness offensive, but now he moved around as easily as if he were alone, or showing off.
She had made breakfast – toast and soft-boiled eggs – although she ate nothing herself, but just kept downing mugs of sweet milky tea. He ate his own egg and hers, but when he looked at her she saw he had tears in his eyes that he wiped away quickly with the back of his hand.
Go, she thought; go so I can start grieving. The days ahead would be strewn with burning coal and lined with barbed wire and there was no other way than through; so, she reckoned, the sooner she could begin the sooner she would be out the other side.
‘I’ve got time for another cup of tea,’ he said.
‘No. No, you don’t.’ She got to her feet. ‘The traffic can be dreadful at this time of the morning.’
He looked a little surprised. ‘But I’ll be going against the traffic. Anyway, the car won’t be here for another ten minutes at least.’
‘Better get going then,’ she said.
‘I’m screwing up your life again, aren’t I?’
‘Yes. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
He looked at her. ‘Would you move to the States? You could work over there just as well as here.’
Her heart skipped a beat as if it was already celebrating. But she shook her head. ‘No. This is my home. Everything you see I’ve built for myself. I took nothing from my husband in the divorce. And it’s not so easy to start again, even for a freelance. I’ve built up a reputation here, I have my contacts; people who know my work and trust me. And there’s Mrs Shield, and my friends. I might end up hating you, leaving it all behind to sit around in some cabin waiting, waiting for you.’
‘What’s with the cabin? It could be a real elegant condo or a cottage in the Hamptons.’
‘Wherever… waiting for you to turn up and dreading for you to leave? What kind of imbalance would that bring to our relationship? I would become someone else, some dependent, clinging, frustrated version of the woman you love. And,’ she put her arms round his neck and looked him deep in the eyes, ‘I still don’t entirely trust you. This time, if I’m going to have my heart broken I want it to be on my home ground.’
‘You can trust me,’ he said. ‘But I don’t blame you for not knowing that… yet.’
She sat on the bed and cried at the sight of the crumpled sheets. She lay down and rested her head on the pillow that smelt faintly of him.
She took a picture of the bedroom. It became the first of a whole series of shots where absence spoke strongest. A child alone outside the school gates, a woman alighting from a train on to a deserted railway platform, the same woman keeping to one side of a double bed.